ActionTec's VoSKY Call Center: Cell-phone Bridge for Skype

When I first looked at ActionTec's Internet Phone Wizard, I was pretty impressed. The Wizard allows Skype users to answer, and place, Skype calls using a traditional analog phone. By connecting the Internet Phone Wizard to your home phone wiring, you could replace your home phone service with Skype and bypass your local dial-tone provider altogether.

My initial feeling about the Wizard was that its market embrace would be very small. After all, you'd have to be a fairly heavy Skype user in order to dedicate a handset to Skype calls (and there are USB and Ethernet handsets that can actually display the Skype buddy list, which makes them better for the job). It just didn't seem like the ActionTec phone wizard was much more than a hacker's tool, useful for connecting Asterisk to Skype, and so on.

But ActionTec's follow-on product, the VoSky Call Center, is actually quite useful. Its basic function is very straightforward: allow Skype users to forward phone calls back and forth betwen traditional phones and the Skype network via your PC.

At first blush, this may not sound like much, but think about it. If you communicate frequently with Skype but don't want to lug a laptop or purchase a Skype-certified cell phone just to have access to Skype while you're on the go, the Call Center may be just what you're looking for. Connect the Call Center to your PC (via USB) and to your phone line, and you'll be able to have incoming Skype calls ring on your cell phone (or on any phone with a standard E.164 phone number).

You can also place calls into the Skype network from your cell phone, by dialing into the VoSky through the phone line you've connected to it. Perhaps coolest of all, the VoSky can send your buddy list notifications to your cell phone by means of an alert call. And, since we're really talking about bridging, it's nice to be able to transfer calls back and forth between your Skype account and your traditional phone without a major interruption to the call. All pretty cool stuff.

What isn't cool is the fact that ActionTec still doesn't appear to be supporting the Mac, despite Skype's release of an OS X version of the SkypeAPI, which is what underlies the VoSky's operation. Also missing from the VoSky is a second phone line port, which would be useful if you wanted to alert two cell phones simultaneously of an incoming Skype call.

Of course, the VoSky Call Center obsoletes the ActionTec Internet Phone Wizard, so if you own one of those already, it might be eBay time.

--Ted Wallingford